To feed or to educate: Hard choices for the extremely poor

Contents

Abstract

A programme of tranferring income generating assets such as goats, cows and chickens to the extremely poor in Bangladesh improved the income of the beneficiaries. However, the programme had little effect on children's education or automatically improve school attendance of the recipients children. It is suggested that transfer programmes need to have additional components targeting education of extremely poor children, such as 'conditional cash transfers' linked to enrolment.